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a1
University of North Texas
a2
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Responses to Terrorism (START)

ABSTRACT

As
new academic journals have emerged in political science and existing
journals experience increasing submission rates, editors are concerned
that scholars experience “reviewer fatigue.” Editors often assume that
an overload of requests to review makes scholars less willing to perform
the anonymous yet time-consuming tasks associated with reviewing
manuscripts. To date, there has not been a systematic investigation of
the reasons why scholars decline to review. We empirically investigated
the rate at which scholars accept or decline to review, as well as the
reasons they gave for declining. We found that reviewer fatigue is only
one of several reasons why scholars decline to review. The evidence
suggests that scholars are willing to review but that they also lead
busy professional and personal lives.

Abstract

This paper presents the agent-based model INFSO-SKIN, which
provides ex-ante evaluation of possible funding policies in Horizon
2020 for the European Commission’s DG Information Society and Media (DG
INFSO). Informed by a large dataset recording the details of funded
projects, the simulation model is set up to reproduce and assess the
funding strategies, the funded organisations and projects, and the
resulting network structures of the Commission’s Framework 7 (FP7)
programme. To address the evaluative questions of DG INFSO, this model,
extrapolated into the future without any policy changes, is taken as an
evidence-based benchmark for further experiments. Against this baseline
scenario the following example policy changes are tested: (i) What if
there were changes to the thematic scope of the programme? (ii) What if
there were changes to the instruments of funding? (iii) What if there
were changes to the overall amount of programme funding? (iv) What if
there were changes to increase Small and Medium Enterprise (SME)
participation? The results of these simulation experiments reveal some
likely scenarios as policy options for Horizon 2020. The paper thus
demonstrates that realistic modelling with a close data-to-model link
can directly provide policy advice.

This is a blog (now) associated with the European Social Simulation Assocation SIG on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science". For all queries about the SIG, or items to post here please contact Bruce Edmonds "bruce at edmonds dot name". Thanks